Cloudless May (75 page)

The officer went off. If he remembered that they were also menaced by anti-tank or machine-guns, he let them take their chance.

“I've a good mind to blow this bridge now,” Ollivier grumbled. “I have two of my children on the island, waiting to set it off at the last minute. The question is—will they know which is the last?” He laughed, and recovered his temper.
“No—we must keep a bridge open for you on England. Do you insist on any port? Dover? Newcastle? Where the devil is it, by the way?. . . My deserters—they're not such bad chaps?” he said, smiling. “They didn't give me away. . . .”

“What do you want me to do?” Rienne asked. The sun was burning his shoulders through his tunic. He moved them—it was delicious to feel his young bones move in the sun.

“Ah,” Michel said, “you're under my orders. . . . You've been inside these Somuas? I'm going to drive one of them. I have my gunner. Do you think you can load a 37? Of course you can. Do you good. Take years off your rank.”

The tanks were in the nearest side street. A platoon commander, Lieutenant Drouin—fair and blue-eyed, a Norman, a handsome young devil—was driving the second. He must have decided to use up in an hour his reserve of gaiety for a long life; he lodged it in his cheeks, his eyebrows, his tongue—the end of it showed between his white teeth.

While Ollivier was checking over his tank, talking to Drouin, Rienne had time to ask himself why he had stayed. It was useless, what they were doing. He had behaved with childish insanity. Only to please Michel?

Drouin parted with a few more smiles and climbed with his crew into their tank; he set off along a lane which would bring him into the road again nearly half a mile to the north. His orders were to attack in the rear of the first German column while Ollivier engaged it from the front. Rienne laughed; he had recalled the day when Ollivier, answering a question in his first week at the School, began, “Offensive tactics are simple, you have only to advance. . . .”

“In with you, Bonamy. By God, you're going to wish you were two foot shorter.”

Ollivier took his tank by side streets, intending to come out on the main street a little farther up. . . . For Rienne nothing was real. Heat, pressure in his eyeballs, his head, the unreal insistence of dreams. . . . A tearing clatter. . . . One of the anti-tank guns at the bridge had opened up. The German 88's, by the sound close behind their tanks, answered by shelling the south bank of the Loire—no doubt crediting the defenders with at least enough sense to be there. . . . Rienne's cramped discomfort dropped off. He felt anxious not to forget
anything, as though he were going into action for the first time.

Ollivier turned into the main street. Two German tanks, ahead of the column, were coming along slowly. The guns at the bridge stopped firing, Ollivier turned left towards the tanks and stopped dead, for his gunner to fire. He missed. Ollivier zigzagged nearer, stopped. A direct hit on the turret of the German tank. It shook itself and kept on. The third shot, much lower, disabled it. Rienne loaded and sweated. . . . The second German, still about six hundred yards away, was firing. He had missed twice. . . . “Jeannot,” Ollivier shouted at his gunner, “he's a worse shot than you are. . . .” Jeannot turned his turret towards the German. An anti-tank shell passed very close, and Rienne forgot where he was and ducked. Ollivier went off into a fit of malicious laughter. . . . Jeannot fired, missed. . . . Rienne was loading when the earthquake struck them. The shell passed under Ollivier's feet. No one was hurt, but the transmission had been wrecked. Talking to himself, Ollivier tried all five forward speeds. None worked. . . . “So what?” he said. . . . Thinking he had killed them, the German had ceased firing; no need to suppose that Germans are less logical than other people. Jeannot put his hand on the escape trap. “No, no,” Ollivier said, “you'll only be holed.”

The reverse gear worked stiffly, groaning. Rienne was forcing the tank backwards with his wrists and the back of his neck. The German fired without hitting them. . . . “Jeannot, my child, I begin to think better of you,” Ollivier cried. . . . Jeannot fired and missed. . . . How absurd it must look from outside, Rienne thought. He had begun to suffer from the heat, and when he closed his eyes he saw the Loire rushing towards him between sandbanks. . . . The nearest side street was too far, and Ollivier crashed the tank backwards into a shop. They crawled out over tussocks of splintered wood and plaster. The guns at the bridge were firing again, and the tank, which had been roaring towards them, stopped. . . . “My good little gunners,” Ollivier murmured. He sent Jeannot flying through the back door of the shop. Fumbling in his right-hand pocket he took out two small sticks of dynamite, and from the left two fuses. They must be set carefully, he told Rienne, without too much friction, or the whole thing would explode. He had the
air of a schoolboy making his first, experiment with two gases. He placed one stick of dynamite in the chamber of the gun, and another inside the tank on the floor. Lighting the two fuses, he seized Rienne's arm and rushed with him into the back garden. The sun struck them like a cool jet. Just as they reached the lane, the tank blew up. From Michel's face, Rienne thought he had not been sure.

The three of them ran through side streets to the bridge.

A long line of German tanks was approaching, shelling the guns at the bridge as it came. Behind the tanks, the German artillery was still firing at the south bank.

Very good for Stoffel, Rienne thought.

He lay down and watched the leading tanks dodging from side street to side street of the main road; stopping for not more than a second, they fired one shell at the guns, then disappeared into the side street to emerge by another nearer the bridge. The gunners only caught glimpses of them, and always at a different range. . . . The two forward guns were silent. “But they kept it up for ten minutes,” a man told Ollivier.

Rienne's body felt cool now and his mind lucid. Why did I stay? he thought again. He felt the absurdity and importance to the question. Not to be able to answer it, when any moment he might stop thinking. . . . A pity. . . .

There were too many Germans. The men in the armoured car had been killed. One of them, very small, was sitting, his back against the parapet of the bridge, hands spread out to prevent himself slipping through the girders into the Loire. Of the two left at the anti-tank guns, one was killed at this moment, and the second hit in the chest. Rienne crawled to him.

“Don't worry, we'll get you back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're all right? You're not afraid?”

“I'm cold.” The cold reached his knees, his lips—he smiled—his eyes. He was dead.

“Good God,” Michel said quietly.

A German tank half a mile up the road had turned sideways and reeled into the ditch. Drouin's tank appeared. It drove head on into a second. The explosion sounded above the other noises, and the flames of both tanks gushed sideways to blacken the trees. The brief pause was broken by the German artillery.
A shell fell on this side of the bridge. It had taken their gunners all this time to realise where the defence was. How long? Twenty minutes, or years?

“Time to go,” Rienne said.

“Do you think so?” Michel said, smiling. “I would sooner stay here with my Group.”

But he followed Rienne, and with Jeannot they began to crawl across the bridge. The nearest tank was giving them the benefit of its machine-guns. Rienne had forgotten the difficulty of marching on your stomach; another good little exercise. A yelp from Jeannot, whose finger had been nicked: he crawled leaving a trail of red drops, like a child who has pricked herself sewing. Michel charged into the first house on the island and threw out his two sappers. They ran, leaving a trail of playing-cards, and flung themselves on the exploder. Nothing. Cursing, they tried again—and again. Nothing. “Fuse gone,” Michel said calmly. “Where are your fuses?” One of them ran to his haversack on a chair in the doorway. Michel snatched and emptied it on the step. His hand hovered for a moment over the fuses. Rienne watched the strong, rather rigid fingers spread out. With a shock of happiness he remembered Michel's hand moving across the pages of his essays, covering them with his large stiff writing, without a correction—as sure of himself as if he were holding a plough. . . .

“Wait,” Michel said.

Rienne watched him run to the middle of the bridge, running against the lunatic precision of the machine-guns. Lying flat, he squeezed himself between the iron girders; his head and half his body hanging out of sight over the river. A hand came back and felt in his pocket. “What is it?” Rienne thought aloud. . . . “His lighter,” Jeannot said. . . . Rienne turned his head. A blast. Thrown in the air, he landed on his face and hands. Pieces of girder and concrete fell round him. Then a series of tiny fragments knocking on his steel helmet. He stood up. Seizing his arm, one of the sappers pointed at the doorstep. He stammered and shook.

“Look—he took the instantaneous fuse. . . . I didn't notice. . . .” He spread his hand out over the little heap of tools and fuses.

“Come,” Rienne said, “we haven't time.”

With the others, he ran across the second bridge, for a few hours longer the watershed between France and Germany. At one moment a single shell dropped in front of them. No one was hurt. No doubt the account was closed for the day. They reached the Square. There was no one. No military police, no Stoffel. The shelling had torn large gaps in the road and wrecked the theatre. The hotel was not touched: an officer who had been sheltering in the cellars under the café crawled out and shouted to them. He was unintelligible. . . . Rienne walked quickly along the Quai Gambetta; the houses had suffered, but he saw no other sign in them of life. The shelling began again. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a small boat dart out under the bridge. Two men rowed frantically; a third, in the bows, held up a white flag. He went on; fatigue, his head reeled, he leaned against a wall and watched the boat. The light springing back from the water hurt his eyes. Lifting them, he saw the cloud he had pointed out to Michel, the same. The immortality of clouds had begun. . . . The shelling stopped. But the Boches won't storm Seuilly by boat, he thought; they won't come in at all this evening, they'll wait until tomorrow for their sappers to lay a pontoon. . . . Was it worth it, Michel? . . . His mind cleared. He had the answer to a question which had ceased to be important. He had been wrong to think of himself as only a soldier; he was also an individual, and the individual had reached a point where the soldier could do nothing with him, could only leave him with his friend on a private plea of indiscipline. He felt a deep shock. After all, I am not so reliable, he said to himself. . . . He was not sorry to have found himself out.

With an effort, he remembered where he had hidden his car—in the Place de Verdun, in an empty garage. He turned to go there.

“Ah, Michel,” he groaned. “Why?”

He did not want to reproach so stubborn and smiling a shade. Searching his mind for the right words, he could only find there: Look at the sky, look at that cloud. . . . Michel burst out laughing.

Shortly after seven o'clock he was in Thouédun. Crossing the bridge over the little river, he was forced to stop the car. His head was swimming again. He got out and leaned on the bridge, but the warmth, the calm, pressed too heavily on him; he could not admit it into a mind still full of a weight of unreality. Michel, lighter than he was, had reached Thouédun already, though he had never seen it: dead, he must be adding his friend's memories to his own.

He passed the blackened rubble of houses destroyed in the raid. Two women and a young thin boy were working there, piling by the side of the road stones which could be used in rebuilding. They had seen a good deal of use, these stones. . . . He stopped at the vicarage. Letourneau looked at him and said, “Why not sleep for an hour?” Sitting at the table, he put his head on his arms and slept. At the end of an hour Letourneau's hand on his shoulder drew him from a smooth darkness he left with reluctance, but found himself when he opened his eyes calm and restored, his mind clear. Mourey had come into the room, and Letourneau was opening a bottle of wine: he took a loaf out of his cupboard and dusted the plates with his sleeve.

Rienne told him he was leaving France: he had hoped to take a friend, Michel Ollivier—“but he preferred to stay with his Group.” Would either of them come?

“And leave my scandal-loving peasants?” Letourneau said, smiling. “With no priest to make fun of? Impossible.” One of them, he thought, may be feeling already the awful loneliness of men without God, and could be pushed by it to despair or violence. . . . And the Germans would be in the village. Even without brutality—harder to do with than brutality—one of them might be kind; a girl or a woman might come to like him: and what then, if there were no one to explain to her that they were both the victims of their own goodness and the justice of men, and try to turn the bitterness to another Justice?

“And you, Jean?” Rienne said.

“I have my own very small place,” Mourey said after a moment. “I may be wrong about us, this may be the end. If it
is, I must try to save a little—by slipping it into the children's memories.” For years, he thought, the heart of this rich land has been failing. . . . Even here. . . . Perhaps a weariness too profound to be cured had fallen on them all. They had had to work incredibly hard, not to better themselves, only to keep their delicate balance between the natural and the human—in short, to remain French. The effort had become intolerable. It was easier to let go, to sleep. Neither their fear of invasion, nor the envy of certain of them for the wicked efficiency of the Germans, would have prevailed if it had not been for their weariness of being French, of their endless labour to be French. . . . Mourey did not believe this, but it was possible.